Graph Attention Network for Text Classification and Detection of Mental Disorder

Abstract

A serious issue in today’s society is Depression, which can have a devastating impact on a person’s ability to cope in daily life. Numerous studies have examined the use of data generated directly from users using social media to diagnose and detect Depression as a mental illness. Therefore, this paper investigates the language used in individuals’ personal expressions to identify depressive symptoms via social media. Graph Attention Networks (GATs) are used in this study as a solution to the problems associated with text classification of depression. These GATs can be constructed using masked self-attention layers. Rather than requiring expensive matrix operations such as similarity or knowledge of network architecture, this study implicitly assigns weights to each node in a neighbourhood. This is possible because nodes and words can carry properties and sentiments of their neighbours. Another aspect of the study that contributed to the expansion of the emotion lexicon was the use of hypernyms. As a result, our method performs better when applied to data from the Reddit subreddit Depression. Our experiments show that the emotion lexicon constructed by using the Graph Attention Network ROC achieves 0.91 while remaining simple and interpretable.